The ’70s. The weird, in-between decade — part ’60s, part ’80s. A mix of optimism, pessimism and
cynicism. An American stew of smog, Watergate and Earth Day.

It’s all history now, unheralded, in a way, but the National Archives is looking to change that
with a striking new exhibit that provides, in scores of color pictures, a portrait of the United
States in the ’70s.

Titled “Searching for the Seventies: The Documerica Photography Project,” the exhibit is based
on an archive of 22,000 photos that were taken by the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency in
the 1970s and forgotten.

The project was supposed to document environmental problems of the time, but it wound up
illustrating the broad fabric of life.

The exhibit, which features about 90 photographs, runs through Sept. 8 in the Lawrence F.
O'Brien Gallery in the Archives building in Washington. There are
hundreds more photos
online.

They do capture the horrors of pollution:

Gutted automobiles sitting in a pond filled with acid- and oil-tainted water in 1974 near Ogden,
Utah; children swimming against the backdrop of a chemical plant in 1972 in Lake Charles, La.; a
small house in Poca, W.Va., with laundry on a clothesline and power-plant cooling towers in the
background in 1973.

But they also show off the decade’s people.

Two young women, their arms entwined, posing against a graffiti-covered wall in Brooklyn; a
couple — he in a powder blue suit, she in a red dress, white shoes and hat — in Chicago in 1975; a
Colorado rancher in cowboy hat and denim jacket against a snow-covered backdrop.

“As you walk through the exhibition,” said David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States,
"those of you of an age will recall your own memories of this era — the amusing, the embarrassing,
the life-changing. But that’s part of the march of history.”

Jim Gardner, executive for legislative archives, presidential libraries and museum services,
said the exhibit “explores a decade that we tend to overlook.”

“No one would be surprised if we did an exhibit on the ’60s, and we can all imagine that
ourselves,” he said. “But the ’70s is a very different thing.”

The collection of photographs resulted from the work of the late Gifford Hampshire, a child of
the Dust Bowl and a World War II veteran who was hired as a press officer by the EPA and directed
the original Documerica project.

The little-known Documerica photos were noticed about 15 years ago by curator Bruce I. Bustard,
who found them in the Archives and realized they would make a great exhibit. He interviewed
Hampshire before he died in 2004.

“This was kind of his life’s work,” Bustard said. “He was prouder of this than anything else he
had done in his career. Unfortunately, the pictures were kind of lost for a long time.”

Hampshire, who had been a photo editor at
National Geographic magazine in the 1950s, was heavily influenced by the famous
photographs of rural America taken by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and ’40s.

Hampshire hired scores of freelance photographers, at $125 a day, and sent them across the
country to chronicle what they saw. There were a lot of “wayward photographers sleeping over at the
house,” his daughter, Victoria Hampshire, said of her childhood home, a farmhouse in Fairfax
County, Va.

“He would be absolutely floored if he knew this was happening today,” she said. “He didn’t feel
the original project was appreciated. . . . It got basically stuffed in the archives.

“It was hard for him. He saw what he thought was a very valuable project just be stuffed away in
the dust,” she said. “I don’t think he ever felt that it served its full purpose. And I think it
will now.”